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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Books |
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Book Review |
Cracking the Frozen Sea
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| A SOMBRE AND SUBVERSIVE
FICTIONAL MEMOIR FROM ONE OF THE MOST ACCOMPLISHED WRITERS OF OUR TIME |
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Published :1 January 2010 |
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O YOU REALLY BELIEVE that books give meaning to our lives, John Coetzee asks his lover Julia in Summertime. “A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us,” says Julia, paraphrasing Franz Kafka. The question Summertime asks but does not answer is: what if it is the novelist’s heart that is the frozen sea? Is it possible |
then to still hold to Kafka’s view about the power of fiction? Summertime is the third novel in a trilogy of fictionalised memoirs; the second novel, Youth, asks the same question though from the perspective of an aspiring rather than actual writer, while the first, Boyhood, explores a child’s troubled sense of identity in relation to the land of his birth.
In Summertime, the life of writer John Coetzee, between the years 1971/72, when he returned to South Africa from the United States, and 1977, when he first gained public recognition for his writing, is being chronicled by a biographer called Mr Vincent. John Coetzee, at the time this biography is being researched, is dead. He is—with regard to many of the biographical facts known to the public—the same person as the writer JM Coetzee: of South African origin, novelist (in one scene, Coetzee presents Julia with a copy of his first novel, the just-published Dusklands), and winner of the Nobel Prize for and winner of the Nobel Prize for Dusklands Literature.
The novel consists of a series of interviews that Vincent conducts with five people who knew him at different points during this five-year period. Additionally, there are autobiographical fragments from the notebooks of John Coetzee, written in the third person but referring to himself, possibly notes towards a memoir that he meant to write but didn’t.
At one level, Summertime can be read as a literary biography. By setting it in the years preceding his recognition as a writer, the novel answers to a natural readerly curiosity about the elements that shaped Coetzee’s vision. For instance, the novel develops the thought—also alluded to in Youth—that what appeals to Coetzee is not politics, but justice. His lover and colleague Sophie Denoël’s word for it is ‘Utopian,’ this longing for “the day when politics and the state would wither away.” This does not mean that Coetzee is ever fanciful. What we experience in Summertime is a bleakly segregated South Africa and the flight of Europeans from a country whose history of tensions is reaching boiling point, a flight made with as much sense of entitlement as the journey once made inward “to the remote tip of a hostile continent [to] keep the flame of Western Christian civilization burning.”
But in telling us that John Coetzee didn’t like writers who espoused a political programme,
Sophie also reminds us that we are reading a book of subversions. Take Summertime’s elliptical nature. We have glimpses of, rather than the full story, of how the protagonist lived for five years of his life. Julia says that the story of her relationship with John has a head and a tail but no body; Adriana, a Brazilian dancer and immigrant to Cape Town, whom John Coetzee briefly falls in love with, barely communicates with him; and one of the interviewees, an ex-colleague called Martin, questions the basis of the whole project, wondering why Vincent is seeking out memories of short-lived love affairs and personal entanglements rather than “the man’s actual achievements as a writer.” | | | |
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